Looking Back on 2025

In some ways I would rather leave 2025 behind and not talk about it again… but that’s not how life works. Let’s do a quick review and look forward to 2026.

• In January, I caught some snow action with CN 5704.
• Early in March, I worked in Toronto, then did some railfanning with my son Nick.

Much of 2025 was taken up with the illness and death of my father-in-law, Wayne Franklin. He was a good man and his passing left a lot of sadness in my family. Needless to say, trains took a back seat for much of the year.

Wayne was definitely the closest person to me who died in 2025, but not the only one.

• My old friend Tim Dryden died at the very end of 2024.
• Canadian publishing icon and friend Morgan Turney died in February 2025.

Life goes on.

Later in the year, I returned to railway things.

• In July, Jason Paul Sailer and I saw five trains around the city.
• In early September, I did a grain elevator tour in southwestern Manitoba to revisit some old wooden friends.
• In September, I visited Halifax, and revisited some train stations in the Maritimes. Chris Mears and I met up for an enjoyable chat.
• Also in September, I turned 58 and celebrated it with a hike in the wilderness between the CN and CPKC main lines.
• Early in October, I attended Real Rails 2025. That was very fun and I’m so glad I went. I met some new people, caught up with old friends, gave one and a half presentations, and saw some great presentations. We toured the Ontario Southland Railway and I did a bit of railfanning in Kitchener.
• In October I explored a new-to-me area of Saskatchewan, down Weyburn way.
• In December my wife and I went to eastern Europe (Hungary, Slovakia, Czechia), saw many trams, and rode a few trains.

I managed to finish scanning all of my own negatives. That was a big accomplishment… although I still need to catalogue several hundred of them. At least they are scanned!

On the “being published” / “public relations” front:

• I was interviewed by Operation Lifesaver Canada for Rail Safety Week.
• My photo of CN 5704 was on the cover of CN Lines Volume 22, Number 3 – the second time I’ve had a photo on the cover.
• I passed 20 years of blogging in July.
• My news article about Cando’s new all-electric locomotive was published on Railfan & Railroad’s web site, and copied to the Nov-Dec 2025 Branchline magazine‘s news section.

I created a category, Publications, that will track everywhere that I’ve been published outside of this site.

On this site, I’ve started tagging posts a little more thoroughly. You may see a “tag cloud” on the right showing the tags, with the size of the words indicating how many posts were tagged with that phrase.

Some specific tags you may want to peruse:

• Book review
• Mental health
• Computer geek
• USSR
• Guest post

Speaking of guest posts, I haven’t had one of those in a long time. If you’re not a spammer, by all means reach out to me at steve@traingeek.ca with an idea! Ideally it’s related to trains but I’m pretty open minded. After all, I write about music and computers and airplanes and mental health, so I have a few tracks in my mind, at least.

Into 2026

First and foremost, I hope everyone I know stays healthy in 2026.

My wife and I hope to travel to Italy in May 2026. I would like to make one other “big trip” in 2026; I’m thinking Newfoundland or Vancouver Island, but it’s definitely just a hope at this point.

We won’t be traveling to the USA in 2026. I haven’t been in the US since a brief drive through in 2022.

I have a lot of ideas for projects.

• I’d like to reissue Passing a Half Century, with larger print, more maps and more background material.
• I plan to print some photo books, on Blurb or a similar platform. Initial thoughts include trams of Europe, my early photos (1999-2006), even Italian laundry! I love seeing my photos in print.
• I want to write a couple of magazine articles, for CN LINES and CP Tracks and maybe Branchline.

I have many slides and negatives waiting to be scanned and catalogued, and digital images also waiting to be named and keyworded.

There’s never enough time. All we can do is spend the time we have thoughtfully.

As always, my family is the most important thing to me, and I’ll do my best to be there for them.

Thank you for following this little blog, reading and commenting in 2025, and I look forward to talking to you, and hopefully with you, in 2026 and beyond.